Medicare Malady #03-07: You Call This

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Whether you are hammering out a union contract, settling the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict or getting your five year old to eat
vegetables, everybody in the world negotiates.

The new House leadership now wants the feds to negotiate drug
prices for American seniors. Unfortunately, it won't work. Why? As
Heritage Foundation health care experts Greg D'Angelo and Robert
Moffit explain in a new
paper, there are rules to successful negotiations, and the
government can't follow those time-honored rules when "negotiating"
Medicare drug prices.

Government "negotiation" would surely denigrate into "an
exercise of government power to fix prices and exclude from the
market any company offering a drug at a higher price," D'Angelo and
Moffit write.

In other words, the government price "negotiation" will
necessarily limit patient choice, increase regulations and raise
drug prices. That's no way to help seniors seeking effective,
affordable drugs. Instead, it would kill the real negotiations that
already occur among private pharmacy benefit managers for Medicare
drugs prices. This is why the 2003 Medicare prescription drug
benefit is costing far less than originally projected.

To read more about the dangers of letting government "negotiate"
Medicare drug prices, click
here.

For more information or to receive an e-mail version of
"Medicare Maladies," contactmedicaremaladies@heritage.org
or call Heritage Media Services at (202) 675-1761. ("Medicare
Maladies" is a regular feature, first launched in 2003 and revived
in 2007, from The Heritage Foundation. Sad to say, there's another
malady coming your way soon. Other "maladies" are also available on
heritage.org.)